RX: More speech, not less, is the cure

Freedom of speech is a topic that get news reporters pretty worked up. For many, First Amendment issues are an academic exercise.

For journalists, it’s a daily reality. We live the First Amendment and wouldn’t be here autonomously reporting local news without it.

That means our understanding of these issues was hard won as we express what might be an unpopular opinion: Court records should not be made confidential if a person is acquitted or has charges dismissed.

On its face, this may seem like a good idea. We live in a world where court records are readily available 24/7 on the Internet to anyone inclined to look.

It’s a boon for reporters. But there has to be a downside to putting all of these things online.

If you’re applying for a job, for example, and your employer runs your name through those systems, just having a drunken driving case listed next to your name could cost you that position — even if two clicks later a person can see those charges were dropped or led to an acquittal.

A person innocent of a crime is thus stuck with that blemish on his or her record.

The argument then becomes, if a case ends in a dismissal or finding of not guilty, why not make those records confidential?

Sen. Fred Dyson has proposed a bill that would classify as confidential any records of court cases that ended in a dismissal or an acquittal. But there’s more here than meets the eye.

To illustrate our misgivings with this bill, we posit a competing scenario to the DUI case. Say a politician is accused of bribery, but police botch the case. The evidence can’t be admitted and the politician has a good enough lawyer to get the case quickly tossed. The news media doesn’t hear a peep until it’s already out of court, and now those records, since the case has been dismissed, are no longer public.

Doesn’t the public have a right to know what the politician was accused of? We argue that it does.

Back to that wrongfully accused drunken driver, the problem lies in the dissemination of that information. The potential employer would have to be willing to delve deeper into the system to discover whether the DUI was thrown out or the person found innocent.

In Alaska’s online system, CourtView, the first page of a name search shows the type of case, filing date, date of birth and case status. This last category shows a simple “open” or “closed.”

If this hypothetical DUI case is “closed,” that potential employer wouldn’t know if the applicant had been convicted, acquitted or had the case dismissed without delving deeper into the CourtView system.

Instead of passing laws to pull these things out of public view, we should work to make the court records viewable online more user-friendly. The federal court already does it. An easily accessible letter from the judge deeming the arrest to have been wrongful could clear up fears any hypothetical employer has. Just as easily, CourtView could show more than just “open” or “closed” in the case status column and add “acquitted” and “dismissed.”

There’s an old quote that journalists love to repeat from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”